The Resurrection of Indie Radio opens with the story of Jonesy’s Jukebox, a radio show hosted by Steve Jones, from the Sex Pistols, on Indie 103, an “indie” station owned by Clear Channel, the corporate entity largely responsible for today’s bland, homogenized radio landscape. The highly targeted programming it pushed from its central offices helped drive away radio listeners to satellite radio and the iPod. Some parts of the dial have survived though:
It is striking to note that satellite radio and the iPod are not encroaching on National Public Radio. Unaccountably, NPR’s listeners apparently perceive it as a trembling invalid with such a tenuous hold on existence that people still regularly respond to an ancient email hoax claiming that Congress is about to destroy the network by eliminating its modest federal subsidies. In truth, NPR is a radio heavyweight whose audience has increased by a staggering two-thirds since 1999. And some in the industry have noticed. Though they did not consciously emulate public radio, a scatter of stations around the country — Indie 103 in Los Angeles, KBZT in San Diego, KQMT in Denver, KNDD in Seattle, WRNR in Annapolis, and perhaps a dozen others — have tried to create a kind of rock radio that models NPR’s conversational tenor, lengthy attention span, and relative lack of hype. Fred Jacobs calls it NeoRadio.